Toward A New Frontier

By Frederic Golden

A glorious start for the first U.S. spacewoman

Ride, Sally Ride Ride that big bird in the sky Ride, Sally Ride It's your turn to fly among the stars

--From a rock single by Casse Culver

Up and down the beachfront motel strip adjoining Florida's Kennedy Space Center last week, space buffs gathered in force. SORRY, NO VACANCY signs hung as far as 50 miles away. Some 1,600 correspondents packed the press grandstand. On the beaches around Cape Canaveral, half a million people watched. Not since the first flight of Columbia two years ago had so many enthusiasts assembled for a shuttle liftoff.

The object of this interest was not so much the flaming bird itself but rather one of Challenger's crew, Sally Kristen Ride. As Challenger headed off on the seventh shuttle mission, a bare 59 milliseconds late, the jubilation was as much for Ride as for the machine. By finally launching what Air Force Lieut. General James Abrahamson, chief of the shuttle program, called with old-fashioned chivalry "the first U.S. lady astronaut in space," NASA gave the shuttle program as much of a popular boost as it could have got from the most powerful new rocket.*

Ride, 32, a physicist by training from Encino, Calif., seemed almost born to the Brotherhood of the Right Stuff. She said little as the shuttle smoothly climbed skyward, except to take issue kiddingly with Bob Crippen, 45, Challenger's veteran commander, who was making his second shuttle flight. Said she: "He keeps saying there's nothing exciting happening. I'm not sure I'd go along with that."

For all the hoopla over Sally's ride, the flight also includes a number of other important firsts. Challenger is carrying five crew members, one more than any previous flight. One of them is a medical doctor, Norman Thagard, 39, the first member of that fraternity in the shuttle. His special task is to look into "space adaptation syndrome," the queasiness that afflicts so many astronauts during the first hours of weightlessness. True to her cool image, Ride showed no signs of discomfort.

On Friday morning, after six days in space and 95 1/2 orbits of the earth, if the schedule holds and winds and weather are fair, Challenger will end its flight. Crippen and his copilot, Rick Hauck, 42, will glide the 100-ton craft to the first shuttle landing on the new three-mile-long runway at the Kennedy Space Center, with President Reagan looking on. Thus Challenger, which was prepared for flight in a record 63 days, will avoid the long and expensive cross-country piggyback haul that followed previous touchdowns on the Western deserts. The price for the convenience is far less room for error on landing.

By any measure, ST57 (for Space Transportation System), as the flight is called in NASA's abbreviation-prone parlance, is the most ambitious mission to date. Sally and her companions are so heavily "tasked" (more NASAese) that even the energetic Crippen initially had reservations about the workload for his crew. Still, as the mission got under way, the script seemed under perfect control.

Nine and a half hours after launch, Challenger sent off the first of two communications satellites. At $11 million a shot, this is clearly the moneymaking part of the flight. The electronic parcel was the second in the series that Canada has labeled Anik C (from the Inuit word for brother). Among other things, it will provide direct satellite-to-home television transmissions. Sent spinning out of the shuttle's big cargo bay, the satellite automatically fired its booster 45 minutes later and began the long 140-hour climb to a permanent "geostationary" parking place 22,300 miles above the equator. Next day, the Challenger crew was scheduled to repeat the performance with a satellite called Palapa B (or Fruit of Effort in Indonesian) that will serve as a communications link for Indonesia's islands.

Ride's own chief mission will come Wednesday, on the fifth day up. She and John Fabian, 44, an Air Force colonel, will use Challenger's 50-ft.-long "cherry picker," a remote-controlled mechanical arm, to pluck a German-built experimental package called the Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS) out of the cargo bay and let it orbit freely in space. The SPAS is a self-contained laboratory housing eight separate experiments. These involve such potentially important commercial processes as growing crystals for electronic components and forming superfine alloys in the favorable zero-g environment.

If the satellite's television camera works, it will provide the first images from afar of the orbiting shuttle. After some seven hours of traveling alone, the satellite will be grappled on board by Ride. The demonstration is designed to reassure NASA that satellites can be retrieved for repair or servicing, thereby vastly extending their useful lifetimes.

Other experiments on ST57 demand no more than a throw of a switch. Six are contained in a joint U.S.-West German package called OSTA-2 (after NASA'S old Office of Space and Terrestrial Applications), which will test such technologies as glass forming, alloy making and crystal growing in weightlessness. Two other experiments are repeat efforts aimed at producing superpure pharmaceuticals and precisely shaped latex particles for use in medical tasks like blood-flow measurement.

Some of the most imaginative experiments bear a youthful stamp. Caltech students are growing radishes. West German students sent along five tests, ranging from studies of plant behavior to the activities of chemical catalysts. And from inner-city high school students in Camden, N.J., there is a colony of carpenter ants, presumably tightly sealed, whose weightless antics will be carefully filmed.

For all the inventiveness and excitement, the shuttle is flying under a cloud. Only recently, a congressionally commissioned study by the National Research Council questioned whether NASA would be able to reach the projected number of launches, 24 a year by 1988, that would provide enough business for economic viability. In addition, a competitor from Europe is emerging. Two days before Challenger's lift-off last week, the sixth Ariane booster, the proud creation of the eleven-member European Space Agency, took off from its equatorial launch site in French Guiana with two communications satellites, one British, one West German. The Europeans think that their three-stage, unmanned booster is now ready to grab off as many as a quarter of all communications satellite launches.

In his new book Beachheads in Space (Macmillan; $14.95), veteran Space-watcher Jerry Grey notes that the shuttle is "only a means to an end: a space 'truck' whose main job is to carry payloads into space." What those payloads will be remains a question. NASA wants to use its gifted rocketship-plane to build a permanent space station, where men and women would live and work for weeks and perhaps months. Eventually, these orbital platforms could be used for launches to the moon and beyond.

But such activities require a commitment in brains and dollars that neither the Reagan Administration nor Congress has yet made. Meanwhile, the Soviets, by launching increasingly larger and more complex space stations, are clearly pressing ahead with their vision of what Princeton Physicist Gerard O'Neill poetically calls the high frontier.

It is nice, and high time, to have an American woman out there among the pioneers. As Shuttle Chief Abrahamson put it: "We can't afford to waste the talent of half the people in our society." And by attracting renewed attention to the space program, Ride helps urge all Americans to consider what the nation's role in space should be in the exhilarating years ahead.

--By Frederic Golden. Reported by Sam Allis/Houston and Jerry Hannifin/Cape Canaveral

* And also caught up with the Soviets, who launched their first of two female cosmonauts 20 years ago.

With reporting by Sam Allis, Jerry Hannifin This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.